Unpacking the Chalcedonian Formula: From Studied Ambiguity to Saving Mystery

One of the central questions Christian theologians continue to ask themselves, as they confront the mystery of the person of Christ, is, what is the significance for us today of the Council of Chalcedon? For generations of modern scholars, especially those in the West, the dense and rather technical phrases forged at that fifth-century gathering of Christian bishops and appended to a restatement of what we know as the “Nicene creed” represented a major milestone in the Churches’ ongoing clarification of how disciples are to understand the person of Jesus the Savior.

In J. N. D. Kelly’s widely used survey, Early Christian Doctrines,¹ for instance, Chalcedon’s “settlement” of the twenty-four-year dispute between Nestorius and his Antiochene supporters and Cyril of Alexandria and the Church of Alexandria was the culmination of “the decisive period for Christology”² in the early Church, an attempt to define an understanding of Christ that could be accepted by all Christians throughout the Empire, but which nevertheless—surprisingly, perhaps—“failed to bring permanent peace.”³ Aloys Grillmeier, in his foundational study of the growth of early Christian understandings of Jesus, speaks of the years up to Chalcedon as temporally defining “the development of belief in Christ from its beginning to its first climax in a council of the Church.”⁴ In an influential study of the theology of the seventh-century monk and theologian Maximus the Confessor, Hans Urs von Balthasar emphasizes the centrality of Chalcedon’s formulaic, classically dialectical picture of the person of Christ as central to Maximus’s whole approach to God, the world, and the human spirit. The reason, Balthasar argues, lies in Chalcedon’s ability to affirm both unity and abiding difference in Christ as the dominant pattern of God’s relationship to creation:

From the moment that Chalcedon, in its sober and holy wisdom, elevated the adverbs ‘indivisibly’ (ἀδαιρέτως) and ‘unconfusedly’ (ἀσυγχύτως) to a dogmatic formula, the image of a reciprocal indwelling of two distinct poles of being replaced the image of mixture. This mutual ontological presence (περιχώρησις) not only preserves the being particular to each element, to the divine and the human natures, but also brings each of them to its perfection in their very difference, even enhancing that difference. Love, which is the highest level of union, only takes root in the growing independence of the lovers; the union between God and the world reveals, in the very nearness it creates between these two poles of being, the ever-greater difference between created being and the essentially incomparable God.⁵

With a little help from German Romantic philosophy, and perhaps from his Jesuit confrère Erich Przywara, Balthasar here sees in the Chalcedonian picture of Christ not only Maximus’s central inspiration, but the early Church’s final paradigm for conceiving how the transcendent God can be present and crucially active in the world.

One might multiply examples. But does this understanding of Chalcedon’s portrait of Christ really represent its intent or its lasting meaning? What led to its articulation? What was, one may ask, the real achievement of this gathering of over 500 Eastern bishops, mainly from the Greek-speaking East, called by the new emperor Marcian and his long-influential spouse, the Empress Pulcheria, in a port suburb across the Bosporus from Constantinople, in October of 451? On the level of Church politics, at least, it was a step towards restoring a balance, however briefly, between major centers of influence in the Church of the mid-fifth century, and the theological traditions with which they had become associated: a balance precariously achieved in 433, after the bitter controversy over Nestorius’s views on how to conceive the person of Christ, by what is often called the “Formula of Reunion,” which sketched the outlines of traditional faith in the Savior—a formula apparently drafted at that time by Theodoret of Cyrus and proposed by the Church of Antioch, but which was also warmly embraced by Theodoret’s principal rival, Cyril of Alexandria. After heated debates between the bishop of Constantinople, the...